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Dear Fanlore editors and readers,
Finally, after months of work, the MediaWiki upgrade is ready to go live! It is scheduled for Saturday, November 24, at 22:00 UTC. (What time is it where I am?) If everything goes according to plan, there should be no downtime, but you will not be able to edit Fanlore for a short time.
Why the upgrade?
MediaWiki is the software Fanlore and many other wikis, including Wikipedia, are built on. Until now Fanlore was using version 1.15, which is woefully out of date, so we are switching to 1.19. Upgrading will allow us to, for example, install new extensions to better fight spam on the site. For more information about different versions of MediaWiki, you can go here.
Why the new skin?
With the new mediawiki version, we decided to switch our default skin from WordPress to Vector. The WordPress skin is no longer under active development and wasn't meant for this MediaWiki version. Continuing to use it would have meant extensive fixes now and in the future, and we decided against it.
Instead, Natalie (from the OTW's Webmasters committee) and Qem (an AO3 tag wrangler) have very kindly volunteered to customize the CSS to recreate an approximation of Fanlore's old WordPress skin. You will see a few differences: the sections in the sidebar are now collapsible, wikilinks are no longer bolded by default, and the talk page link appears on the left side of the screen. Let us know if anything is broken with the new skin.
To save ourselves much effort, we are only supporting our default skin at this time. It's possible to use a different one, but the formatting might be strange.
Other Changes?
We have removed the bugtracker extension (also no longer supported) and OpenID support.
Problems?
If you discover any bugs or issues, please let us know!
Many Thanks
to Emufarmers, the Systems Committee, astirya, Natalie, and Qem
Finally, after months of work, the MediaWiki upgrade is ready to go live! It is scheduled for Saturday, November 24, at 22:00 UTC. (What time is it where I am?) If everything goes according to plan, there should be no downtime, but you will not be able to edit Fanlore for a short time.
Why the upgrade?
MediaWiki is the software Fanlore and many other wikis, including Wikipedia, are built on. Until now Fanlore was using version 1.15, which is woefully out of date, so we are switching to 1.19. Upgrading will allow us to, for example, install new extensions to better fight spam on the site. For more information about different versions of MediaWiki, you can go here.
Why the new skin?
With the new mediawiki version, we decided to switch our default skin from WordPress to Vector. The WordPress skin is no longer under active development and wasn't meant for this MediaWiki version. Continuing to use it would have meant extensive fixes now and in the future, and we decided against it.
Instead, Natalie (from the OTW's Webmasters committee) and Qem (an AO3 tag wrangler) have very kindly volunteered to customize the CSS to recreate an approximation of Fanlore's old WordPress skin. You will see a few differences: the sections in the sidebar are now collapsible, wikilinks are no longer bolded by default, and the talk page link appears on the left side of the screen. Let us know if anything is broken with the new skin.
To save ourselves much effort, we are only supporting our default skin at this time. It's possible to use a different one, but the formatting might be strange.
Other Changes?
We have removed the bugtracker extension (also no longer supported) and OpenID support.
Problems?
If you discover any bugs or issues, please let us know!
Many Thanks
to Emufarmers, the Systems Committee, astirya, Natalie, and Qem
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